Nanaji Deshmukh: The main force behind Jayaprakash Narayan's agitation for total revolution

Collage of underground newspapersTime: 15 minutes past midnight on Thursday, June 26, 1975. Place: a small office-cum-bedroom on the top floor of the Deen Dayal Research Institute, Rani Jhansi Road, New Delhi. A man - slight of build, grey-haired, tanned deep bronze after weeks of outdoor campaigning in Bihar - picks up the receiver and almost drops it as a female voice at the other end warns: "You have less than an hour to get away. The police will surround your place around one o'clock."The man - Nanaji Deshmukh, general secretary of the Lok Sangharsh Samiti and the main force behind Jayaprakash Narayan's agitation for total revolution - starts furiously telephoning his friends and associates around the country while an assistant packs a couple of dhotis and shirts in a brief case. Less than half an hour later, Nanaji is out of the building, heading towards a small bungalow 10 miles away. At dawn, he is joined by half a dozen of his colleagues and aides and the great underground movement is on.Within 48 hours of the crackdown on the fateful night of June 25-26, Nanaji had got together a small group consisting, among others, of Prof. Subramaniam Swamy, M.L. Khorana of the Delhi Metropolitan Council, Ravindra Verma the Cong(O) leader, and Dattopant Thengadi, general secretary of the Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh.The group was joined later by Kedar Nath Sahni, former mayor of Delhi, V.P. Bhatia, editor of Organiser and Dr J. Dubashi, economic editor of Motherland. Nanaji's terms of reference were very simple: take over the government. The "Operation Takeover" took Nanaji to almost all the state capitals but the police were constantly on his trail and he was arrested in a South Delhi colony during a surprise raid on July 29, 1975.His place was immediately taken by Ravindra Verma, now Labour Minister in the Desai cabinet who went about organizing the movement under the name of "Aftab". Thengadi took his place when Ravindra Verma was arrested at a bus stop in Bombay in December 1975. Other active underground leaders were Sundar Singh Bhandari of the Jana Sangh and Surendra Mohan of the Socialist party, until both were arrested.Thengadi and other leading lights of the Lok Sangharsh Samiti (LSS), N.G. Goray and S.M. Joshi, socialist leaders of Maharashtra, and Digvijaya Narain Singh of Cong(O) were actively participating in the movement right up to January 18, 1977, when the Emergency was relaxed following the announcement of Lok Sabha elections.Nanaji Deshmukh - leader of 'Operation Takeover'The main planks of the movement were concretized at an LSS high level meeting in Bombay in August 1975. They were: publishing underground news bulletins and pamphlets in all the languages of the country in order to break the censor barrier; setting up underground cells at several levels to contact workers and the public; staging protest demonstrations and later organizing asatyagrahamovement from November 14, 1975 to January 26, 1976 in state capitals and districts; raising funds to feed the movement; rendering all possible help to the families of detenus and prospective satyagrahis, and keeping touch with those in jail; organizing a protest movement among the Indian communities abroad and feeding the foreign Press with the true state of affairs in the country; and last but not the least, to keep the movement scrupulously non-violent.Sheaves of partisan material poured out from all big cities. An all India weekly news bulletin was issued from Delhi incorporating important news from the states as well as the national capital. It was duplicated from 20 centres in India. Because of the terror and police vigilance in the early stages - about 7,000 persons were arrested for circulating underground material - each state sent a courier every fortnight to Delhi for the purpose of the news pool. Later, copies of state bulletins were sent by post to selected addressees, which, at their peak, exceeded 20,000 in number.Despite large-scale arrests and sealing of printing presses, the flow of news went on. By the time the all-India satyagraha was started in November 1975, almost every district in India was putting out its own regular bulletin, often just a single cyclostyled sheet. The bulletins highlighted the atrocities on innocent citizens and the goings on in the Indira Darbar. Almost every means of conveyance, including human couriers, cycles, scooters, trucks, private cars and even railways were used to transport thousands of copies produced every week. The bulletins completely destroyed the credibility of the AIR and other mass media.A notable attempt in breaking the censor's barrier was made by launching a cyclostyled official fortnightly bulletin of the LSS from New Delhi. Known as Satya Samachar, it came out on the 12th and 26th of every month for about six months till the police raided its underground office and took away the duplicating machine.Each issue consisted of about 16 to 20 fullscap closely typed pages and carried JP's messages on the front page. It also carried lists of martyrs who had died in jails. There was great demand for it even in official circles and among Congress MPs. (It was edited by V.P. Bhatia under the direction of Digvijaya Narain Singh, MP).Among the better known state bulletins were Janavani and Mashal of Delhi, Darpan from Varanasi and Vajrayug from Hyderabad; Asli Samachar from Bombay and Satya Barta from Gauhati. There were also a host of "irregular" bulletins, often handwritten and cyclostyled, brought out mostly by student groups in Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay, and passed from hand to hand and sometimes stuck on college and university notice boards, with the authorities looking the other way.Among the more colourful bulletins was one brought out by George Fernandes; uncharacteristically, it had a strong literary, almost poetic flavour which sometimes made the reader sceptical about its authenticity. The bulletin was mailed regularly to Mrs Gandhi but, of course, Fernandes' gesture was never reciprocated.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Aug 7, 2014 10:09 IST--- ENDS ---

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Nanaji Deshmukh: The main force behind Jayaprakash Narayan's agitation for total revolution

The man - Nanaji Deshmukh, general secretary of the Lok Sangharsh Samiti and the main force behind Jayaprakash Narayan's agitation for total revolution - starts furiously telephoning his friends and associates around the country while an assistant packs a couple of dhotis and shirts in a brief case.

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